Seagate NAS 2-Bay

Delivers excellent data protection. Remote management service is easy to set up and flawless. Can support up to 10TB of storage. Minimalist and clean, new user interface. Above average read performance.

Cons

Below-average write speed. Drive bays are flimsy and difficult to work with. No audible alert with drive failure. Remote access SDrive feature did not work in tests. Few apps in vendor store for download. Surprising lack of documentation.

Bottom Line

Seagate's 2-Bay NAS is a middling consumer/SOHO drive with solid read performance, small business-class security features, and an improved interface, but it seems fragile, and write speeds are slow.

Seagate's NAS 2-Bay ($699.99, as tested) is the entry-level model in Seagate's latest network storage lineup. This unit is targeted at power users, SOHOs, and small businesses with up to 25 users, though its features make it a primarily a fit for consumers and SOHO users. With the 2-Bay, Seagate unveils NAS OS 4, an impressive new management interface with a pleasantly minimalist design that bucks the current trend of cluttered, cartoonish interfaces. However, the 2-Bay is not problem-free: It has frustratingly difficult-to-remove hard drives, below-average write performance, and a new service for remotely accessing data stored on the NAS that wasn't yet enabled when I tested.

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Pricing and SpecsA standard-sized desktop form factor, the 2-Bay measures 6.79 by 4.6 by 8.5 inches (HWD) and weighs 6.57 pounds. You can order it diskless for $169.99, or configured with 2TB ($249.99), 4TB ($349.99), 6TB ($499.99), and 10TB ($699.99) of storage. I tested the 10TB model.

For some price perspective, the two-bay Asustor AS-202TE, ships diskless for about $227 online. If you add two 5TB HDDs (which you have to purchase separately), then you have to tack on another $450 to $500 for the drives. So $700 is a reasonable price for the 2-Bay with 10GB of storage.

The 2-Bay has a 1.2GHz ARM processor, 512MB RAM, and two USB 3.0 ports. These ports support not only external USB drives, but also printers and devices such as UPSes (uninterruptible power supplies).

The design is very plain. It's a basic, black box with LEDs for power and disk activity and two drive bays. Unfortunately, the drive bays are some of the worst I've encountered. The drives fit into a flimsy tray that has plastic sides with tiny pegs that fit into the screw holes on the side of a hard drive. Removing one of the preinstalled drives was tricky. I had to force the drive out of the bay—carefully. These drive bays seem destined to break eventually.

Shoddy as the drive trays may be, the NAS does support SATA and SSD drives. Seagate has its own proprietary version of RAID 1 called SimplyRAID, which offers Seagate's automated recovery. You don't have to use it though; you can instead configure the unit's two disks as JBOD or RAID 0. For more on RAID, read RAID Levels Explained.

Setup and NAS OS 4I connected the NAS to my network and, from a browser, went to discover.seagate.com. This launched the NAS OS Setup Assistant. You don't need to install the Seagate NAS discovery app, as I had to when reviewing the Seagate Business Storage 2-Bay NAS. Instead, you can get right to work configuring the new NAS.

The Setup Assistant performs the routine NAS startup tasks, such as checking for software updates. It also forces you to set an administrator password. I was glad to see this step in the automated setup; many NASes do not require you to change the default administrator password (the Synology DS414slim, is one example). Creating an administrator password shores up security. It would be better, however, if Seagate NAS also had password-complexity requirements—especially since this NAS may be used in SOHO environments.

The Home screen has only five icons: Device Manager, File Browser, App Manager, Download Manager, and Backup Manager. This minimalist and utilitarian user interface is in contrast to the trend of colorful, animated (and often cluttered) interfaces I've seen in the latest NASes from QNAP, Synology, and other vendors. It's largely a matter of taste, but if informational graphics and icon-based shortcuts are what you're interested in, this isn't the NAS for you. Below is a comparison of the legacy Seagate NAS interface (top image) with the new 2-Bay's NAS OS 4 interface (lower image):

Features and PerformanceSeagate's NAS is designed for consumers and SOHOs, and doesn't focus on home theater integration and multimedia-content management like the QNAP TS-251, for instance. The 2-Bay has no HDMI port like QNAP's device, nor are there as many multimedia-centric apps. That's not to say you can't stream or manage your multimedia content at all with the 2-bay, however. It supports iTunes, UPnP, and DLNA.

It isn't just multimedia apps that are lacking for this unit. There aren't as many apps available across the board for the 2-Bay as there are for other NASes. However, all of the basics are covered with apps for antivirus, IP camera surveillance, and content management platforms such as WordPress. There's also a Download Manager that lets you manage torrent uploads and downloads.

Security-conscious users will be pleased that the drive supports AES 256 encryption for securing data and iSCSI targeting with optional CHAP authentication for securing communications.

You can also remotely access the NAS with new services from Seagate, but this is more of a mixed bag. I was impressed with the Seagate MyNAS feature. To get it running, all I had to do was enable remote access within the UI and then provide a unique hostname for the NAS (Seagate's service checks to ensure that the hostname you provide is not in use). I was then able to access the interface from mynas.seagate.com/ from any browser. The remote access worked well, and I did much of my testing from a remote network.

What if you have multiple users accessing the 2-Bay and you want to give them access to the data on the NAS, but not full access to the management interface? SDrive, one of the new services Seagate is touting with this NAS, is supposed to do just that. SDrive purportedly lets you provide access to a user's data from a PC, Mac, or mobile device. Unfortunately, I never got it working during the test period. A Seagate representative provided some hints and told me that there should be a Knowledge Base article on the feature. I couldn't locate it. In any case, the steps should be outlined within the NAS OS 4 interface and not require even as much searching as I did (unsuccessfully). This spotty documentation of the new feature reflected an overall lack of help and documentation within the unit's interface.

Business users may be attracted to a feature called NetBackup, which allows another Seagate or any rsync-compatible storage device to use the 2-Bay as a backup destination, which could serve as a small business disaster recovery solution. It's features like this that may make the 2-Bay somewhat appealing to smaller businesses.

PerformanceSeagate is historically an average across-the-board performer so I was surprised to see both how well it did with read/copy operations, yet how poorly it performed in write speeds. I copied a 1.48GB video clip from a PC to a NAS share. At 84.5MBps, it was the best read performance I've seen yet from a two-bay Consumer/SOHO NAS.

On my write test, however, the 2-Bay averaged just a little over 28MBps. In general, write speeds are slower than reads, but there should not be this much discrepancy. Comparatively, Asustor's AS-602T (which scored the highest write speed for dual-drive NASes) averaged 108MBps in write performance. If you have many large files to be written to the Seagate, you should expect less-than-speedy performance.

However, the write performance should be adequate if you are going to use the NAS mostly for smaller files, or as a backup solution where speed doesn't really matter. If users are more likely to access data from it rather always copying data to the drive, the 2-Bay is a decent choice.

Drive recovery from Seagate's SimplyRAID mirror configuration is efficient. I pulled the drive from bay two, and the NAS offered none of the audible alerts I got with the QNAP TS-251 or Synology's DS414slim, though the Power button did start blinking red. I like a warning beep with drive failure in case I am not within sight of the device. I saw notifications in the interface warning that the volume was in a degraded state, but I was surprised that you can't set up an audio alert, as you can in most NASes. At least you can set up email alerts, which is more important.

I replaced the drive I pulled with one of equal size. SimplyRAID immediately started synchronizing the drives to recreate the mirror. Seagate's RAID solution works well in providing data protection and should be the RAID option to go with for fault tolerance.

A Middling NASSeagate's 2-Bay adequately serves the main purposes of a NAS, providing provide centralized data storage and data protection, and it keeps that data secure. Its strengths are its new UI, the excellent SimplyRAID, and the very capable Seagate MyNAS remote access. It scores the best when it comes to read operations for two-bay network storage devices. However, its shortcomings are apparent, including its slow write performance, a lack of adequate documentation, and those flimsy drive bays. For a two-bay NAS that has a very well-made chassis and drive bays, and one with stellar write performance, look to the Editors' Choice Asustor AS-202TE.

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Samara Lynn has nearly twenty years experience in Information Technology; most recently as IT Director at a major New York City healthcare facility. She has a Bachelor's degree from Brooklyn College, several technology certifications, and she was a tech editor for the CRN Test Center.
With an extensive, hands-on background in deploying and managing Microsoft Windows infrastructures and networking, she was included in Black Enterprise's "20 Black Women in Tech You Need to Follow on Twitter," and received the 2013 Small Business Influencer Top 100 Champions...
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